Suppose that an employee has the following degrees: BA, BS, and MBA. These degrees could be
stored in a single string as a multivalued attribute named EMP_DEGREE in an EMPLOYEE table
such as the one shown next:
Although the preceding solution has no obvious design flaws, it is likely to yield reporting problems.
For example, suppose you want to get a count for all employees who have BBA degrees. You could, of
course, do an “in-string” search to find all of the BBA values within the EMP_DEGREE strings. But
such a solution is cumbersome from a reporting point of view. Query simplicity is a valuable thing to
application developers – and to end users who like maximum query execution speeds. Database
designers ought to pay some attention to the competing database interests that exist in the data